Questions About Ubuntu One Music Store

[Rodney Dawes]

On Mon, 2012-11-05 at 10:39 -0600, Ma Xiaojun wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Rodney Dawes <rodney.dawes at canonical.com> wrote:
> > The store does not have stores for all regions, and in China
> > you perhaps may be seeing the world store. The songs and
> > artist names are probably translated in the store provider's
> > database for the other stores.
> 
> Now I'm in US. So I have to see the English/US/World store? I cannot
> change to another available language?

You will always get the US store. As the new web store is also part of
the Ubuntu One web site, the store interface itself will mostly always
be in English, until such time that the developers of the site can find
time to implement translations support, and then get it translated into
all the languages of at least the regions we have stores for.


> > Ubuntu/Canonical do not have any real control over the format
> > the tracks are in. But, MP3 is the only format that does work
> > absolutely everywhere. Some tracks are available in FLAC (and
> > possibly other formats) from the provider, but those are not
> > readily available through the Ubuntu One store, due to various
> > technical reasons. You can choose to install the MP3 codec
> > from within the Ubuntu installer when installing, and there
> > are several implementations available for install in the
> > standard Ubuntu repositories. I'm not sure exactly what
> > difficulty you had which caused apport to pop up, though.
> 
> If you are really interested, you should try a fresh install without
> MP3 codec pre-installed. And see how would Rhythmbox behave in this
> situation. This situation is not uncommon because in some region the
> country mirror is slow.

I recently installed a clean version of 12.10 on my new hard drive, to
switch to 64 bit on my new workstation hardware. I didn't install the
codec during install, but did so later. However, my system also isn't
really a fair comparison to what others may have. I have gigabit local
ethernet, and a 75/35 Mbps external connection, via fiber; and I'm using
the official US archive host. Generally, the packages from the archive
download extremely quickly, and install fairly fast as well (IvyBridge
i7, 16 GB RAM, 750 GB hybrid SATA-III SSD/HDD). Also, I wrote the codec
installer that is in the Ubuntu One Rhythmbox extension, and have tested
quite a bit. I've uninstalled and installed MP3 plug-ins for gstreamer
several hundreds of times on my computers to test it. Granted, there
may exist issues which I didn't hit, but if the bugs get reported, and
I can reproduce the problem, or it's obvious what the problem is from
the report and looking at the code, I try to get them fixed as fast as
I can. However, I haven't seen any such bugs reported for quite a while
now.

If you're talking about the general codec installer functionality that
pops up in Totem, Rhythmbox, and other applications that use gstreamer,
that is a completely different set of code to what I'm talking about,
and I don't need to use it as often, but I also haven't really had any
issues with it when I did. Installed the codec I needed OK, and started
working fine. I have seen various people in the IRC channel for
rhythmbox or other channels, have issues with installing codecs on
64-bit though, with the codec installer wanting to install 32-bit
versions of everything, and playback not working with 64-bit versions
already installed. However, while this has happened for a few people,
I haven't seen enough complaints to say that it's common, nor do I know
why it happened for those people.


> Now I'm in US and the us country mirror works quite well.
> When I'm in Hong Kong, I note that hk country mirror is located in UK
> and it is quite slow in Hong Kong.
> When I'm in China, I note that cn country mirror seems to be a non-CDN
> so it works well at most for users of certain carrier.

The Ubuntu One extension for Rhythmbox installs the MP3 codec from the
Canonical Partners repository, which is not mirrored anywhere. It may
be slower from some regions, due to latency, ISP issues, client
connection bandwidth, etc… but it is always from the same place.

> So please don't make the assumption that the user would download the
> MP3 codec during installation.

We don't. However, there are numerous MP3 codecs available, and numerous
ways to install them.